September 14, 2005

A crisp autumn morning is the perfect occasion for a timeless life lesson passed down generation after generation, from father to son.

For more than a hundred years in sleepy rural hamlets and bustling urban centers, fathers have been passing down the indelible wisdom of their forefathers to their eager and impressionable sons. The Birds and the Bees. Integrity. Hard work. The Meteor Game.

Dateline: Saturday, September 17, 2005. 9:13 AM

Son: “Daddy, are we watching the Georgia play that team from Louisiana today?”

Father: “No son, that’s game is pay per view only and we can’t get it on Satellite.”

Son: “That sucks!”

Father: “Stinks, son…not sucks.”

Son: “Sorry. So, what are we going to do today?”

Father: “I figured we’d watch the Florida-Tennessee game, son.”

Son: “The Florida-Tennessee game? Yuk! But we hate those teams.”

Father: “I know. But it should be a good game.”

Son: “But who do we root for, daddy?”

The father takes a long sip of his morning coffee. With a knowing smile, he puts his arm around his impressionable son’s shoulders.

Father: “Son, it’s a Meteor Game.”

Each man with children has moments that define his role as a father. Often, these defining moments come in the form of an innocent question from a child. “What is sex?” “Is lying wrong?” “How does Don King get his hair to do that?” “Who do we root for?”

The third Saturday in September is this Saturday. It’s an unspoken holiday in the state of Georgia. This Saturday, across the state, fathers will be explaining the time-honored concept of the Meteor Game to young sons in record numbers.

This Saturday, fathers will be helping impressionable minds grasp the notion that when watching Tennessee play Florida, you don’t root for either team to win; you root for an enormous asteroid to make the journey from its natural habitat in a belt between Mars and Jupiter to an orange and blue den of iniquity in Gainesville, Florida, picking up horrific speed along the way.

You root for an impact so immense that the resulting heat has an anti-septic, cauterizing power great enough to wipe the scourge of these unsavory teams, their coaches, their fans, the street vendors and the garish tchotchkes they sell off the face of the earth forever and ever. (Amen)

Son: “So, I think I get it. But how big a meteor are we rooting for, Daddy?”

Father: “Son, we’re rooting for the kind of meteor you hire Aerosmith to write a song about.”

Being a Chicago Bears fan, my meteor game is always the vikings and the packers. We used to call it the "earthquake game," though - hoping an earthquake will split down the field and swallow both teams whole. Aerosmith-caliber meteors tend to have more widespread negative effects.